2026-10-04 · VideoFreeTier

Runway Free: 125 Credits, 25 Seconds — or Not One Clip

Runway's free plan is a one-time deposit of 125 credits that does not expire, and Runway's own hint line for that plan reads: "125 credits = 25s of Gen-4 Turbo, or 25 image generations." Runway free credits and Runway ML free access are the same deposit; there is no daily refill to wait for and no expiry date to beat. The 25 seconds is not the whole answer, though, because the same pricing page publishes a per-model cost table — and on that table the identical 125 credits buy about ten seconds of Gen-4.5, or Gen-4, and not one complete generation of Seedance 2.0 Pro or Aleph 2.0, which cost 160 and 140 credits per clip. Which model you pick moves the free tier between 25 seconds and nothing. No Runway generation has been measured here: every rate below is the vendor's own figure, or our division of the vendor's own figures, and never a deduction this site observed.

Watch the same finding as a 121-second video: youtu.be/6frhY4dOfnY

Nothing here requires a sign-up. Every dated figure this site holds is published as CSV, JSON and Markdown on the data page — no account, no email gate, nothing to register for before you can read a number.

The pricing-page rows, in the vendor's own wording

Eight of the nine Runway rows come from the official pricing page — four read on 2026-10-02, four on 2026-10-04. The five that carry a figure Runway states in words:

The remaining four are not less solid, but they are a different kind of row and are named as such: two carry per-second rates this site derived from Runway's own equivalence lines rather than read off the page, one carries the page's per-model cost table, and one — the model-picker row — is not from the pricing page at all.

Two of the stated rows carry the page's phrasing verbatim, because the wording is doing work the numbers cannot. The plan card reads "Free forever... 125 one-time credits to explore Runway's AI tools" — "one-time" is on the card, not inferred from it. The FAQ underneath says "the Free plan includes a one-time deposit of 125 credits that doesn't expire" — so the two facts that decide what this free tier is (it does not refill, and it does not expire) are both stated by the vendor, in the same sentence.

The cost row is a different kind of statement: the FAQ explains that credits per generation depend on model, duration and resolution, and gives Gen-4.5 as the worked example at 12 credits per second. That is a rate with three qualifiers attached, not a universal price, and the row keeps them attached. The last thing those qualifiers do is hand the arithmetic back to the reader: if the cost depends on the model, then a single "how many seconds is the free plan" figure cannot exist.

125 credits, and what they buy depends on the model

The page answers its own question in several places, and the answers do not agree — because they are about different models.

Read the last three rows against the first. The free plan's 125 credits are a fixed quantity; what changes is the price on the other side of the counter. On Gen-4 Turbo they are 25 seconds. On Gen-4.5 they are two five-second clips. On Seedance 2.0 Pro they are three-tenths of the way to one clip, and there is no way to buy the rest without a paid plan. The same grant is generous, adequate, or insufficient depending on a choice the vendor leaves to you.

Two of the rates in that table are not stated as rates by Runway. The FAQ gives a per-second figure only for Gen-4.5 (12). The 5 for Gen-4 Turbo and the 12 for Gen-4 are our division of the page's own equivalence lines: the free line says 125 credits is 25s of Gen-4 Turbo, Standard says 625 is 125s, Pro says 2250 is 450s and Max says 9500 is 1900s — and all four divide to exactly 5.0 per second. Gen-4 works the same way at 625 = 52s and 9500 = 791s, both about 12.0. That is the vendor's arithmetic stated several ways; the division is ours, and the rows say so.

The free plan's own line names one model

There is a second asymmetry in the same hint line, and it is easy to read past.

The free plan's line reads "125 credits = 25s of Gen-4 Turbo, or 25 image generations." The Standard plan's line reads "625 credits = 52s of Gen-4.5, 52s of Gen-4, 125s of Gen-4 Turbo, 78 Gen-4 Images (1080p), or 31 Nano Banana Pro images (2K)." Pro and Max name the same set.

So the paid tiers' lines enumerate three video models and two image models. The free plan's line enumerates one video model. Gen-4 Turbo is the only video model Runway's own free-tier sentence names, and Gen-4.5 — the model the FAQ uses as its worked example — does not appear in it at all.

This page will not turn that into a claim about what the free plan is allowed to run. A hint line is a summary, and the pricing page never states a model restriction for the free tier in words. What it does say is narrower and checkable: the free plan's own equivalence line names Gen-4 Turbo, and the paid lines name more. Whether the free plan can also spend credits on Gen-4.5 is not answered on the page we read — and it is the difference between 25 seconds and ten.

The four models that cost nothing

The ninth Runway row is a different kind of observation again, and it comes from the model picker rather than the pricing page. Read on 2026-10-04, four entries carry a FREE label:

So the free plan has two kinds of free in it. One is the 125-credit stock, which converts into 25 seconds of Gen-4 Turbo, about ten of Gen-4.5, or no complete clip at all on the priciest models. The other is a set of models that do not draw on that stock — the arithmetic above does not govern them, because there is nothing to spend. None of the four is Gen-4 Turbo, and none is Gen-4.5.

Two things about that row are worth keeping straight. First, the grade: this is a report row, read by the site owner from the picker on 2026-10-04 with a screenshot on file. No generation was run against any of the four, so no deduction was measured. The row records a label, not a measured cost of zero, and those are not the same claim. Second, the date: a label in a picker is a UI state, and UI states change without announcement. That is why the row carries a date at all, and why the next reading of the same picker is a new row rather than an edit to this one.

There is also a structural point the picker makes on its own. Seedance is ByteDance's model and Kling is Kuaishou's; neither is Runway's. A free plan can therefore route you to another company's model at no credit cost — the same lesson this dataset keeps arriving at from the other direction, that the name on the model is not the name on the bill.

Only one dated grant in this dataset has no clock on it

Widen the frame and Runway's deposit looks unusual among the models this site has recorded, because the others hand out something that either expires or has to be re-earned:

Read the columns, not the amounts. Three of these five grants have to be claimed again; two do not. Two state an expiry and three do not — and this table does not read a silence as "never", because a row that does not mention an expiry is a row that does not mention an expiry. A sixth model in the dataset — Luma Dream Machine, added 2026-10-05 — cannot sit in this table at all: its free trial credits are stated to exist with no amount and no expiry attached, so there is no grant column to compare. A row that gives no amount is not a smaller grant; it is a missing one.

The practical difference shows up the moment you have a finished idea. With a re-earned daily grant, the free tier is a rate: you can plan against it because tomorrow brings more. With a one-time deposit, the free tier is a total: what you see is all there will ever be, and it is spent once. Runway is in the second group, and unlike Kling's expiring package it carries no deadline to force the decision. What it carries instead is a price list — and the price list is what decides whether 125 credits is a quarter of a minute or a rounding error.

What the rows do not say

The rows are thin on purpose, and the gaps are worth naming rather than filling:

• Whether the free plan may spend credits on Gen-4.5 or Gen-4 at all. The paid tiers' hint lines name them; the free plan's line names Gen-4 Turbo and image generations, and the page states no model restriction for the free tier anywhere. If Gen-4.5 is open to the free plan, the grant is about ten seconds; if it is not, the only figure the vendor offers for the free plan is 25 seconds. This site will not pick one.
• What resolution does to the price. The FAQ says cost depends on model, duration and resolution, and the cost table attaches a resolution to every image model it prices (Gen-4 Image at 1080p, Nano Banana Pro at 2K) — but no row we hold gives a video model two prices at two resolutions. The qualifier is stated; its size is not.
• How long the four FREE labels will last. The picker named four models on 2026-10-04. The pricing page still describes the free tier only as "a selection of generative creative models to test concepts" — a phrase that resolves to no list and carries no date. A picker label is the weakest kind of evidence this dataset keeps: a UI state rather than a statement, and it is recorded as one.
• What a generation actually deducts. No generation has been run against Runway, so there is no measured deduction: no login-wall check, no duration ceiling, nothing to set beside the vendor's rates. The one report row Runway has is the model picker, and a label is not a deduction. For PixVerse and Wan the same page pattern ends with a measured deduction — 50 credits for a five-second generation, and 6 / 15 / 30 credits for two, five and ten seconds — and those rows exist precisely because a vendor's rate and a measured deduction are not the same kind of claim.

That last gap is the honest limit of this page. A reader who wants to know what Runway's free plan really deducts per clip should treat every second above as the vendor's arithmetic and expect the measured number to be its own row, with its own date, once someone runs one.

Does the Runway free plan watermark videos?

This site has no observation that answers it. As of the most recent Runway reading in the dataset — an anonymous session recorded on 2026-10-05 — no row addresses whether the free plan's output carries a watermark, whether a removal toggle exists, or on which plans such a toggle might sit. "Not observed" is a statement about these records, not about Runway's product: it means nobody has logged the fact here, and this page will not fill the gap with a general claim about how AI platforms behave. What the dataset does hold about the free plan is a short list, and none of it mentions watermarking: 125 one-time credits stated on the plan card (vendor, 2026-10-02), the FAQ sentence stating the deposit does not expire (vendor, 2026-10-02), 5GB of asset storage (vendor, 2026-10-02), and four models carrying a FREE label in the model picker (report, 2026-10-04). The watermark question does have a cross-channel treatment elsewhere on this site — five channels with dated watermark rows, and four different senses in which "removal" fails — on Free AI Video Generator. Runway is not one of those five channels, for the reason above: the row that would put it there does not exist yet.

Scope of what this page says

The first four Runway rows were read from runwayml.com's official pricing page on 2026-10-02, from the plan cards and the FAQ beneath them; the credit-equivalent line, the two derived per-second rates and the per-model cost table were read from the same page on 2026-10-04; the model-picker row was read from the site's model picker on 2026-10-04, in a logged-in session. They describe those screens on those dates, not Runway's product in general, and the file names on this site still carry the seedance-2-5-free-tiers stem for link stability — the dataset itself covers every model named above. Comparisons on this page are made against dated rows from the same dataset: Kling AI's trial package and 720P rate (klingai.com, 2026-10-03), PixVerse's free-plan figures and its measured 50-credit deduction (app.pixverse.ai, 2026-10-02), Wan 2.5's plan-table rows and measured 6 / 15 / 30-credit deductions (create.wan.video, 2026-10-03), and Doubao's five generations a day (2026-08-11).

The counts on this page are counts of this site's own records, not claims about how free tiers behave in general.

Not confirmed on this page: no Runway generation has been run by this site, so every rate and duration above is the vendor's own figure or our division of the vendor's own figures, and never a measured deduction; the four FREE labels are a reading of the model picker rather than a measured cost of zero; whether the free plan may spend credits on Gen-4.5 or Gen-4 is not stated on the pricing page, and the difference between those two readings is 25 seconds versus ten; what resolution does to a video model's price is stated as a qualifier but not quantified in any row we hold; how long the four labels stay is unknown; and the 125-credit deposit, its non-expiry and the Gen-4.5 rate are read from a public pricing page and have not been independently re-verified by a second party.

The full dataset — every row this site holds, each carrying channel, observation date and source type — is on the data page in three formats, free to use under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. To turn a grant and a usable rate into an attempt count, the attempts-needed calculator uses only figures from that dataset and estimates nothing on your behalf. Related pages: PixVerse AI Free for a free plan whose measured deduction outweighs its daily grant, and Kling AI Free for a trial package that expires.

Update cadence: figures on this page change only when the dataset gains a dated row that touches them; every figure keeps its own observation date — check it before quoting as current.